The volume brings together seventeen peer-reviewed, revised papers originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), held in August 2010 at the University of Pécs, Hungary. This selection aims to show how theoretical and empirical approaches can be combined in the historical investigation of the English language, what insights and exact information can be obtained about language change in the history of English with the help of tools like historical corpora or with inter- and transdisciplinary methods. The volume is arranged around five thematic headings. The first discusses dialects and regional variation from the viewpoint of contact linguistics and phonological, morphological, and lexical change. The second has syntactic variation and grammaticalization as its focus. Papers on grammatical changes in nominal and pronominal constructions are presented in part three. The integration of loanwords in Middle English is discussed in part four, and the last investigates communicative intentions in historical discourse.
The volume should appeal to linguists interested in historical aspects of dialect and discourse studies, historical pragmatics, contact linguistics, grammaticalization theory, corpus linguistics, and of course language change.